A Provisional Comparison of the English-based Atlantic Creoles *

The accompanying word lists comprise up to 570 items in eight related English-derived creoles, arranged under twelve headings. They are not primarily tables of cognates, although inevitably most entries share cognate features in each language. This must be so, since by definition these creoles are English-derived, i.e. the total present-day lexicon in each is for the most part clearly traceable to English. ¹ On the basis of this one criterion China Coast Pidgin, Neo-Melanesian, etc., would fall into the same group; lexical items derived from languages other than English, however, and—still more important—the occurrence of common syntactic structures, serve to indicate a clear relationship among the English-derived creoles on both sides of the Atlantic, distinguishing them from English-derived pidgins and creoles outside that geographical area. On the other hand, Atlantic creoles derived from metropolitan languages other than English, e.g. Haitian Creole French, the (moribund) Virgin Islands Dutch Creole, and the Creole Portuguese of Guiné, etc., share many syntactic features and non-European-derived lexical items with those Atlantic creoles deriving from English. The wider genetic classification of pidgin and creoles is a vexed problem, and will not be discussed here. ²